Your nose may be key in helping fight obesity.
Aromatherapy isn’t anything new. For centuries, people have been using scents to affect mental and physical health! When it comes to your stomach, the right scent can stimulate appetite or help ease digestive issues. The wrong scent can put you off your feed, so to speak.
A new study from NIZO Food Research in the Netherlands has found that scents may also help trigger a feeling of fullness in your brain — and that might just help curb overeating.
Some scents are better than others at triggering that full feeling. Scents linked with fat, carbs, and proteins — used separately or in combination — significantly increased the feeling of fullness in study participants. Researchers think this might be because those types of food provide energy to the body. Scents used in combination also may suggest to the brain that the meal being eaten is large, and has many parts.
Other factors played a role in stimulating the feeling of fullness — like how chewy something was, and what size bites were taken. Smaller bites with greater chewiness created a greater sense of fullness than larger bites and less chewiness.
The researchers believe that controlling a food’s scent could help lower a person’s food consumption by as much as ten percent. Adding brain-satisfying scents and textures might not end obesity, but it could help. More studies are underway to look at the long-term effects of changing food scents.
It’s an interesting concept. Can you imagine a soda that smells like a Thanksgiving dinner? That sounds kind of gross (Turkey Cola!). Still, in the same way that a meal with parts — a main course and side dishes — is more satisfying than a solo item, I can see how a complicated scent can be more satisfying to the brain than a solo scent. I’m interested to see what the long-term studies come up with!